Tuesday, 25 November 2014

Patrick Norris has
returned from Afghanistan, to Fallbrook, California, north of San
Diego, looking for peace. He's going to help out on his family's
avocado farm, look for boat to buy to start his own business as a
fishing guide. But the Fallbrook he returns to has changed. A massive
fire has virtually destroyed the family business, and his brother
Ted, a perennial ne'er do well who idolises Patrick, seems drawn to
right-wing conspiracies and Tea Party extremists. It's a different
world than the one he left, and that is the real theme behind this
thoughtful and moving novel by T. Jefferson Parker, one of America's
most under-appreciated crime writers.

It's hinted at when,
on his arrival, Patrick bumps into a Korean War veteran in the rest
room at the airport, who thanks him for his service, but says: 'Now
the South Koreans have a better health care system than we do. We're
twenty-third in the world. It's all changed for the worse here. The
country. The people. The government. Everything's gone bad.' 'I hope
you're wrong,' Patrick says. 'It doesn't matter what you hope.'

Parker's book is
about those changes. The communities whose citizens don't want to pay
for someone else's safety (a hit and run at a street crossing has
highlighted the lack of a crossing light; the accident will come back into play later in the story). The people who see
strength in guns and in prejudice. The banks who will not help their
suffering clients. And of course, Patrick's family is involved. The
farm has no money because his parents invested in real estate, before
the 2008 crash. His brother is drawn to Cade Magnus, and his Pride
Auto Repair, a second-generation American Nazi, drawn to guns, and
getting things done against the government he thinks is trying to
take his freedoms.

The Bureau of
Homeland Security comes to investigate the fire; meanwhile the power
company wants to make sure it's not ruled something their fallen
lines or faulty boxes might be responsible for. The town meeting
about the crossing is testy, but Patrick rekindles a relationship
with a reporter, Iris. He finds his boat, and gets a deal on it
because he's a veteran. But things beyond his control go wrong, and
Ted continues to be Ted, and Patrick feels responsible for him.

Parker weaves these
strands together with the ease of mastery. Small items come back to
have deeper, more important meaning. The gratitude of his fellow
citizens can be fleeting, as can be love. And Ted remains a trial.
The story builds to a climax which is unexpected and immensely
moving. Followed by a coda in which a huge storm strikes, providing a
final test for all involves.

I've seen this book
compared to Steinbeck, and that first climax certainly recalls The
Grapes Of Wrath, a great novel about the shortcomings of the
Californian Dream. But I also felt a lot of Upton Sinclair here, a
combination of epic nature and sharp dissection of society's ills. In
that sense too, you might look at this as an historical novel, even
though the history is current. Parker's best novel is probably the
deceptively-titled California Girl (2004) which won the best-novel
Edgar; it is another family story set in the early 1950s and the late
1960s, and like Full Measure deals with changes in society and the
way people deal with them; it also features a 'bad' family set
against the 'good' family, as dissenters almost. But with Parker, it
is the response of people who hold onto the 'traditional' values
which are key to the story.

Parker has achieved
some traction in the US recently with his series of books about
Charlie Hood, an LA County Sheriff, but his career has consisted
mainly of stand-alone novels whose setting has been an important
part, and whose characters are so well drawn they involve you quickly
in that setting. California Girl, despite its awards, wasn't quite a
breakthrough book. But Full Measure, with its mirror turned
perceptively on the most crucial fissures of America, and with its
deeply human core, might be that one. TJP deserves it.

Full Measure by T.
Jefferson Parker

Sandstone Press
£8.99 ISBN 9781908737809

NOTE: This review
will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

Monday, 10 November 2014

The grim darkness of
Black Coal Thin Ice is set out in the opening scenes: coal on a train
dumped into a conveyor belt, with a severed hand lurking amongst the
lumps of black. Meanwhile, in a bleak hotel room Zhang, a police
detective, has silent sex which itself seems almost disembodied, with
a woman who turns out to be his wife, which we learn when she hands
him the divorce papers just before she leaves on a train. Zhang tries
to stop her from going; an umbrella springs open on the platform; Zhang falls to the ground;
she is gone. He kicks a bottle down the stairs. 'There's no point in
crying, you're just wasting time'.

Back on the job the coal-stained body part leads Zhang to
a beauty parlor where what should be a routine arrest goes wrong, and
he is shot in a scene laid out as creatively as John Woo at his peak.
But the shootout has more mundane consequences for Zhang.

Five years later Zhang
is a security guard, in a coal factory, living a bleak life which
centers on drinking the past into oblivion. Then body parts start
showing up again, body parts and ice skates, and Zhang finds himself
pulled back into the investigation. Which leads him to a beautiful but
enigmatic clerk in a dry cleaners, and Zhang, trying somehow to
redeem himself as a cop, begins to become obsessed with her,
propelling him into the equal dangers of finding the killer and
making something of this once again silent, withdrawn sort of
relationship. Thinking she may hold the key to the puzzle puts her in
line to be a victim herself, but Diao realises that the detective and
the potential lover share many of the same characteristics: both are
investigating to see if what they see of a person is really there.

Writer-director Diao
Yinan blens the grittiest of backgrounds and the most depressing flatness of life with an almost mystic undercurrent, like Marquez writing a hard-boiled detective novel. He touches bases with most of the familiar tropes of modern noirish film, not least Zhang's apparently feeling
comfortable only in the presence of his fellow cops. But the distinctive combination which Diao blends here seems to make a statement about China itself,
presented as an almost two-dimensional world of hidden darkness,
where the personal hides under the surface. Diao creates some
brilliant visual metaphors, including the various uses of coal,
conveyors, and trains. Ice skating figures into the mix, with the
characters gliding or stumbling on the ice, and at one point engaging
in a chase along a frozen path away from the rink. There are
fireworks and ferris wheels, public spaces where people are supposed
to share but move in their own circles, as you would on a skating rink, and finally a brilliant tango
scene that recalls Marlon Brando and sees Zhang doing his own steps
while everyone else sticks to the programmed pattern.

As Zhang, Liao Fan is
brilliant: a mix of bravado and insecurity, a man at home with that
inevitable realisation that you may uncover something you don't
really want to find out. Gwei Lun-Mei is his
perfect foil as the withdrawn clerk who holds the secret to the
killings; she is beautiful in a way that invites sa man's protection
while at the same time suggesting something beyond a dry cleaner's.
The story resolves with a clever twist that makes perfect sense, and
propels us back to the film's beginning, where we see understanding
both love and death are equally difficult. Black Coal, Thin Ice is
one of the best detective films I've seen in a long time, and Liao is
a director who draws you into his story and makes you live the pace
of his vision. Brilliant.

Thursday, 6 November 2014

I began my downsizing yesterday by unloading some vinyl to my friend, the guitarist Andy Wiersma, at Harold Moore's. Among the records was Elliott Carter's Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello and
Harpsichord with the intellectual Nonesuch cover. I used to go to sleep
listening to it in college, and sometimes stare at the artwork while under the influence.

There were the early 70s ECM records which played on
the turntable which sat on the amp which sat on one speaker on the
floor of the closet, as I wrote my McGill masters thesis in the tiny flat on Avenue Lorne I shared with Theresa. I wrote poems based on the tunes I was hearing: one of the joys of my later life was meeting Eberhard Weber and Jan Garbarek, and sharing some of those poems with them.

These were records I'd brought with me, from Montreal back to Connecticut, and then to Britain when I moved to London in 1977. There was also some Ives, from the same time, and some lovely Savoy jazz collections I'd picked up early in my stay in this country. It's a cliche to call it the background music of a life; it was part of the foreground of my life, a palpable part of it.

I wasn't a fanatic, nor an anorak. Oddly, I learned this week that one of my teammates on the freshman
football team at Wesleyan, Skip Wood, had passed away. I still have the
first Earth Opera album which I bought from Skip, who had the biggest
record collection I'd ever seen, probably in 1969. I know this because
the sleeve boasts the words 'Skip Wood Record' and a control number, written in large
letters with a magic marker. It saddens me to think that record too will be sold off soon; my only link to Skip will be gone.

I felt a great sense of loss, of time that will never
be recovered, and the pressures of change brought on by circumstance,
not time. Even
though I don't have a turntable, and haven't listened to the vinyl in
years, when I sorted through them, taking them from the wine carton in
the attic, holding them and reading the liner notes, I felt a warmth
emanating from them. I could hear and see the passage of more than four
decades of time. And while I still listen to the same music on CD, I
don't feel that warmth. I don't hold the cases and feel as if they're
alive the way record albums were. Listening to a CD is more like a
business transaction than a communing ritual. The feel and look and
sound of those records was the first thing I thought of
when I woke this morning. I felt a great sense of loss. Goodbye old
friends.

Saturday, 1 November 2014

Ace Atkins
introduced Quinn Colson in The Ranger, and when I reviewed that book
last year (you can link to the review here) I noted the tropes from
westerns (which Ace and I had discussed with Mariella Frostrup on
Open Book), and from novels and films about returning war veterans,
itself a sub-genre that goes back to encompass at least the Civil
War.

Colson is now the
sheriff of Tibbehah County, Mississippi, based in Jericho, where he exists in an sort of uneasy
truce with the local crime boss Johnny Stagg. The novel opens with a
prison break from Parchman Farm, famous from blues songs. Esau Davis
and Bones Magee make their getaway on horses, just like in a western,
but from there the story gets very modern. Because they're headed for
Jericho, where one of their former convict pals, Jamey Dixon, has
seen the light, and is a fundamentalist preacher with a line in
redemption. And, coincidentally, he's living with Colson's sister
Caddy, who's got a line in redemption herself.

And then it gets
complicated. What Atkins does well is delineate the violence that
simmers just under the overheated surface of rural Mississippi. It's
something that gets pushed aside in the daily life of the people,
just as the the rest of the darker side of human behaviour does. At
times Atkins' prose, which in this series is very much in the Elmore
Leonard vein, touches on the Southern gothic overtones of a Flannery
O'Connor, and it is a pleasure to read.

But Atkins is also
writing the continuation of Robert B. Parker's Spenser novels, and very well too (see my review
of Lullabyhere), and at times Quinn Colson starts to resemble Parker's Jesse Stone. He is partnered by a wise black woman sheriff.
He has a relationship with his former true love, Anna Lee, who's now
married to the good-guy town doctor. And although he doesn't have
Stone's ability to charm a steady stream of women, the town
undertaker and coroner, Ophelia, seems to have a soft spot for him.
Anna Lee, Ophelia, Jericho, Esau...it gets very literary, if not downright Biblical, down there in the Gothic
South.

This is a series
book, and though it gets resolved with action and violence, enough
issues both violent and non-violent, are left unresolved to ensure
the next entry in the series will continue to put Colson into
perilous positions. There's something major breathing under the
surface of the Colson series, and it will be fascinating to see what
Atkins does with those intimations.